


Escalation

by afteriwake



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-26
Packaged: 2018-01-17 03:37:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1372498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/afteriwake/pseuds/afteriwake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It starts off when Sherlock steals Joan's fuzzy red sweater, and turns into an all out prank war by the end of the whole affair. Joan reflects upon what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Escalation

**Author's Note:**

> Finally getting back to writing fic for this show (yay for season 1 of Elementary being on DVD). This is my Watson fill for **land_deduction** 's Bingo Card challenge (both shows card) as well as my answer to two Tumblr prompts I received ages ago: "Sherlock steals Joan's fuzzy red sweater when she's not at the brownstone. She finds out" from **lizzieraindrops** and "brownstone prank war" from **technicolorrelays**.

It all started when he stole her fuzzy red sweater. When she was asked about it later by their friends as Sherlock was recuperating in the hospital with a broken leg and a petulant stare she would insist it all started because he had stolen her favorite sweater. He was always stealing little things of hers and then putting them somewhere for her to find later. He said that was one of his tests for her, to work on her deduction and her logic and all of that. She thought most of the time that was bullshit and he got a kick out of watching her get frustrated. Yes, there were times he had legitimate things he wanted to teach her, but there was always a knowing smirk right after the bored “You can find it on your own, this isn't hard to puzzle out” look he gave her. It was the smirk that always gave him away.

But back to the sweater. He had picked the absolute wrong day to pull this particular prank on her. She was in a rush, off to meet her mother for lunch. Her mother had given her that sweater, and when it was seasonally appropriate she wore it during their meetings, usually as a subtle reminder to her mother that she did actually love her and had fond feelings for her most of the time, despite the fact she was no longer a doctor and was unmarried and compared to her brother was far from perfect. It wasn't much she could do, but it was something. But he had stolen her sweater and she couldn't tear the brownstone apart to find it. He had been reading a book, looking up every so often with an arched eyebrow as she tried all of his usual hiding places and gave up in a huff.

It was a disastrous lunch. Her mother had asked her why she didn't find a man and settle down like her brother had with his wife, why she wasn't hugely successful in her new career and bringing in money solving cases. At least she had accepted that this was what her daughter wanted to do with her life. She knew, deep down, her mother would always want her to go back to being a doctor. She would always want to be able to proudly claim that she was the mother of Joan Watson, surgeon. Instead she had to make do with being the mother of Joan Watson, consulting detective, and she knew no matter how often her mother might _say_ she approved of the new direction her daughter's life had taken she really wanted it to go back to how it had been. She couldn't really oblige her mother, not after everything. Not after she had found something she excelled at that fulfilled her deep inside. She couldn't go back, and she would be damned if anyone tried to guilt trip her into doing it, relative or not. One day she hoped her mother understood that.

She had returned home and began the search again, ignoring Sherlock's attempts to help, which were really veiled distractions. If he opened his mouth to tell her a place to look she avoided it because she knew that was exactly where it wasn't. He was doing it so she would learn to focus her deductive skills on the objective and ignore all the things that tried to take her attention away from the case at hand, or so he would say. Once again, she felt the only reason he did it was to annoy her because clearly he got some satisfaction from the whole thing, considering how many times a month he did it. There was always one such incident on a weekly basis, and every once in a while she thought he got puckish and did it two or three times in a week because he was bored and watching her get more and more annoyed relieved some tedium for him.

She gave up after three hours. Eventually it would turn up; he'd probably hang it up in her closet after he realized she had gotten bored with the game. Really, that was what this was. It was a game between the two of them where he pulled the part of annoying little brother and she was the exasperated, more mature, more responsible older sister. And that day she decided she wanted a little payback. Two could play this game, she had realized. And maybe it would be nice if she could get the upper hand in this game, at least once. If she could just pull the wool over his eyes and hide something of his long enough for him to frantically search for it and then give up then maybe she wouldn't mind it so much the next time he inevitably did it to her.

Maybe.

–

She decided simply swiping something of his and hiding it would not work. No, she had to be crafty. She had to think like him. Sometimes that was hard, when he'd jump from thought to thought and go from problem to solution in mach ten. She couldn't do that because her brain didn't work that way. It wasn't a whirring machine constantly filled with thoughts like his was. No, being that way was too hard and the only time she ever might have attempted to think that way was after three pots of coffee and no sleep for two days. She supposed she'd be so sleep deprived and yet so keyed up that her mind would only function that way. She wasn't about to find out. No, she had to be devious like him without being obvious.

When she was asked later how it got so out of hand, when she had a sprained wrist and a gash on her forehead resulting in ten stitches that were probably going to leave a scar, she'd say it came from that act of retribution. It had blown up from one tiny prank to get him back for stealing her fuzzy red sweater when she needed it, to teach him a lesson for doing annoying stuff like this under the guise of teaching _her_ lessons on how to be a better detective when what he _really_ wanted was entertainment into something much worse. One simple act had spiraled out of control, but it had all started from that point.

She had decided to change the locks in his bedroom. He had a lot of locked up things in there, and she wondered if she should ever worry about that, but he had locks on both his bathroom and his bedroom doors. She went to a hardware store and bought new doorknobs with locks and keys, and she made sure he was gone for a considerable length of time before she got to work. It really wasn't all that hard to swap out a doorknob, she had found, and when she was done with the bathroom lock she locked it and slipped the key in her pocket. Then she went to work on the bedroom doorknob and locked it when she was done as well.

She knew if she had the keys on her it would only be a matter of time until he picked her pocket to get them. She was going to hide them, make him search for them the way she had had to search for her sweater. She knew hiding them separately was the best idea, but there were only a few places she could hide them. Her bedroom was off limits; she didn't want him poking around through her things any more than he already did. It would take something clever but not obvious. In the end she hid one of them under the loose floorboard that she knew he used to hide a few of her things and she dropped the other one in a pot of tea she brewed. And then she waited for him to come home.

She took immense satisfaction as he tried valiantly to open his bedroom door. He huffed and puffed and finally took out his lock pick. She knew eventually he would either get new doorknobs or search for the keys. And twenty minutes later there was a frustrated sigh from his bedroom. He stomped down to the ground floor and demanded to know where the keys were. It was all she could do not to crow with laughter as she told him that he was the cleverest man she knew and he could figure it out himself. It took him no time at all to find the bedroom key under the floorboard but he didn't find the bathroom key until late that evening when he went to prepare himself a pot of tea. She tried her best to look innocent as he muttered that this meant war. She could take whatever it was he threw at her.

Hopefully.

–

Their little prank war escalated. It never got vicious, but she managed to one-up him over and over again. She was quite proud of herself for that. They never let it interfere with their cases, because they both had respect for the NYPD and the people they worked with to let that get so far out of hand that they couldn't do their job. Gregson and Marcus had no clue what was going on at the brownstone, no clue that when they weren't concentrating on the cases they were plotting ways to outprank the other one. The pranks were getting more elaborate or more subtle, depending on who was pranking who. She knew eventually they would need to stop, that one of them would need to wave the white flag of surrender, but she hoped it was he who did it first, not her.

When asked by Gregson later what on earth she could possibly have gotten out of the whole thing she didn't know how to answer him. At first it had been that she wanted revenge and she got it. Then it was the challenge of coming up with these pranks and making them work and being crafty and clever, just like Sherlock. And finally there was a perverse sense of pleasure in watching him stomp around like a tantruming two-year-old and knowing it was all her doing, and it came with a sense of satisfaction that she, Joan Watson, could have pulled these pranks on Sherlock and gotten away with them. So she had gotten a bit out of it, but it had all gone too far.

He had decided to use water. And stairs. And really, he should have known it was a bad combination. But she supposed that he just wanted to get back at her so badly he hadn't been thinking clearly. She was thankful neither of them had gotten more seriously injured in the ensuing accident. They were both in pain, battered and bruised by the end of it, but they were both alive. She watched him be loaded into the ambulance and felt that maybe it had all gone too far. She had wanted him to surrender first but perhaps it was best if she called the truce.

An hour later she went to his hospital room. He had a concussion so they were making him stay overnight. He was on his cell phone, which she was fairly sure was not keeping him nearly entertained enough. She sat down in the chair next to his bed and waited. He would acknowledge her soon enough. After five minutes he spoke. “Truce?” he said without looking at her.

She leaned back in her chair, nodding. “Truce.” And then he looked at her and gave her a grin and launched into talking about their latest case and all the things she would need to do and she smiled at him, thankful that the whole war was over and they could get back to as normal a life as they had had before.


End file.
